Web-Exclusive Q&A

Doug Bruce's first sit-down interview since losing his memory, only on GQ.com

Are there inaccuracies in the film

Well, there are a couple of things. In terms of what I may have been like before the accident, it sort of portrays me as a twodimensional yuppie, a partying kind of guy. This was obviously a bit worrying to me, because I couldn't identify at all with that person. And I spoke at length to my exgirlfriend and other friends, and they said I wasn't like that at all. I may have had a streak, you know, when I was very young, ten or fifteen years ago. They were saying that Rupert knew me only through that period of time. The fact that I'd changed from this gregarious person to someone more reserved and thoughtful makes for better viewing.

**Would you prefer that the movie not be released **

It's slightly complicated in that when I agreed to do [the film] with Rupert, the idea was that it would be shown for two screenings on Channel 4 in the UK, and I said okay, fine. And I had spoken to so many people after the accident who were really quite riveted by the whole story.

**Hollywood people **

No. Friends, people I'd met. They'd come back to me several days later and say, "Wow, you know, I haven't stopped thinking about it." When Rupert told me he'd like to enter it into Sundance, I'd already seen rough cuts of it, and I thought there was absolutely no chance of it ever being accepted.

**After the film premiered at Sundance, you must have had calls from people in Hollywood who wanted to remake it. **

None whatsoever.

**Really If I were Michel Gondry and I'd heard about, basically, the real guy from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I would have been curious to meet him. Did he call you **

Yeah, we spoke.

**He called you **

No, we met through mutual friends. I think he did a great job with Eternal Sunshine, but I don't think there's been a film—even Memento—that's captured what I was going through.

**What do movies like Memento and The Bourne Identity get wrong about amnesia **

Everybody is way too confident about everything. For me, there is a sort of childlike wonder of the world, and insecurities, and just trying to establish who you are as an individual. And in the portrayals I've seen, the amnesiacs tend to be much more pragmatic.

**Amnesia is so often a plot device in movies and soap operas, yet I've never met anyone who has had amnesia, or even someone who knew someone who had amnesia. **

Really Okay, 'cause one of my best friends from before the accident had amnesia. It's not as rare as people think, I think.

**What happened to your friend **

He was playing soccer on a football field without any ID or anything like that and clashed his head. He ended up in a coma, taken to hospital. No one knew how to get in touch with his parents. His sister called me to ask if I knew where he was, and I said, "No, he goes surfing in Bali quite often, so he's probably run off." All his lights were on, and he hadn't used his bank cards. But he got his memory back after two weeks or so. I spoke to him after my accident, and he was the first person who I felt knew what I was going through.

**Did he have any advice for you **

The first month in New York, it was basically a hundred phone calls a day. I spent a lot of time with neurologists and MRIs and all this stuff, and it's tiring. On top of that, I was trying to absorb all this information. It's extremely stressful. He said to me, "Listen, you've got lots of people telling you who you are, what you are, this, that whatever. You've got a great opportunity to let it all come to you. Don't force anything. Make the choices you want to make, and you'll be a much happier person." And I sort of followed that. It really relad me.

**One thing I felt the movie didn't do well was explain what you could and could not remember—the difference between procedural and episodic memory. You lost your episodic memory, so you couldn't remember names and faces **

Yes. At the beginning, I didn't know anything. I couldn't sit at a table, for instance, and hold a conversation in a group of people; I felt lost. There were gaping holes in my general knowledge. And so I struggled a bit. After ten minutes of holding a conversation with somebody, it became quite apparent that something was wrong. Like, I didn't know somebody of great importance or some important thing. It's gratifying for me now to have a conversation with someone and they think I'm a completely normal person. It means I've made a lot of progress.

**But if you were at a restaurant and saw "cheese sandwich" on the menu, you'd know what that was, right **

Well, I could imagine what it was. But since then, I've seen a cheese sandwich is not the same in France as it is in England or America. The thing with episodic and procedural is they overlap. So sometimes there is a gray area where you're not sure. It's never been fully explained to me. And all the neurologists and neurosurgeons I've seen, they've got their different opinions.

**How many doctors have you seen **

Six, probably. I was handled by, I think, the best specialists available in New York. A friend of mine who had important friends recommended people. I got treated by, I think, as good as you can get in the city.

**Are you still going to see doctors **

No, mainly because I was [a student] under school insurance before. And now I'm not.

**It's such a crazy story. **

It's more crazy than you think, anyway. I think at Sundance, people were saying, "It's another Blair Witch. It's too incredible."

**I thought it was a hoax. I still think it might be. **

Why

**Because the story seems too good to be true. **

Why

**I assumed your friends were in on it. You made this movie, it came out at Sundance, and you'd sell the movie rights to Hollywood. You'd tell me if it was a hoax, right **

No, I feel really quite upset. You're coming in here… It's not a hoax. People find it too incredible to be truthful. It's more incredible, actually. What Rupert didn't include in the story is that once I'd spoken to Nadine's mother; she sent Nadine to come and identify me at the hospital. And the guy at the hospital showed her the wrong person! So she goes back home saying, "Mummy, I've never seen that guy in my life." I call the police back and say, "Nobody's come." And they said, "Listen, she's probably lying. She's not interested in you."

**Why wouldn't Rupert put that in the movie **

Probably because he needed access to Coney Island Hospital. There are more things like that, coincidences that have happened to me since the accident. You know the scene where I go to the ocean for the first time

**Yes. **

I went with a friend. The only other person there was this beautiful woman with a metal detector combing the whole beach. We were there for four hours. Eventually, my dog goes toward her. And I go up and I say, "Hi, what are you doing" She says to me, "Well, this is the worst possible day. I came here two days ago with my fiancé, and he got me this beautiful ring, and I lost it. I've bought this metal detector, and I've been looking for it all this time. What are you doing here" I said, "You'll not believe why I'm here." It'd been such an emotional day for me, and the colors were beautiful, and the ocean was just fantastic. It was almost as if I'd gone to heaven. And so my friend is listening, and he says, "Can I have your metal detector" And he switches it on, and at my feet he hears this bzzz. And I just know it's the ring, and I just plunge my hand down. This mountain of sand appears, and on top of it is the ring with the diamond facing up. And I handed it to her. I've had a succession of things like that happen to me since the accident.

**How are your relationships with old friends in London **

I see a certain obligation toward the former relationships. Sometimes I'm a little curious—I was friends with this person We don't have the same references of humor on events we'd done together. They can't talk to me in the same way; they can't expect me to have the same responses.

**What about your father **

For him it was very difficult in the beginning. From what I've been told, we had clashed a lot and had a difficult time being around each other.

**What had you fought about before the accident **

He's very strongwilled, very set in his ways, and then there's lots of personal family issues that have since been explained to me. We don't have that now. In a way, I look up to him more now.

**What do you remember about first meeting him **

I'd flown in to Paris and had to wait around for four hours because I'd missed a connection. And I arrived in Spain really jetlagged and tired.

**Did you have any procedural problems at the airport **

No, because I'd had my exgirlfriend Magda explain to me, for literally an hour and a half, what to do in airports.

**Even though it's procedural **

It's not really, though, is it I mean, you go to check in, and then what happens Taking your coins out, your shoes off. So I get there, and my father—you know, I was expecting some resemblance, to see some part of me in him, but there was nothing like that at all. It's such a strange dynamic, being in the same house as him. He was very good about it. He left me my own space; he let me come out of my shell. He tried to mother me a bit, which I think is normal. He was pretty emotional about the whole thing. It was very tough for him. I think he did a pretty good job. I don't know how you can prepare someone for something like that.

**The film doesn't mention that you own property in Panama. What's the story **

I have this big farm with thousands of fruit trees. I probably bought it a few years back or something, when you could buy stuff for nothing. I have a lawyer there and a friend who lives there. And so they contacted me and explained to me, Okay, you've got this, this, and this.

**How long after the accident did they call **

Within that first month. It's quite an important thing. There are lots of people who sort of depend on me.

**There are people who work on the farm **

Yeah. There are 7,000 fruit trees.

**Have you gone to see it **

It's the most amazing place in the world.

**What was it like when you got there Like "This is all mine!" **

In a way, it made me feel good about myself. Apparently, this place was just scrubland where cows used to eat, and I intended to reforest it and have some of the people work there. These are people who I think were pretty much next to starvation, malnourished with ten kids, that sort of thing. And being able to help them out, to get them back on their feet.

**You had been renting a pretty impressive loft in Manhattan. Do you remember a moment where you thought, Oh, I have money; I'm not poor. **

Uh, yeah. It's sort of an abstract, but I was told, yeah. It's not something I really want to talk about.

**When you looked in your closet for the first time, how did you feel about your clothes **

I quite liked the pants. It was the tops I didn't like very much. I thought they were all a bit tight. I don't know. Maybe I'd been keeping tops when I was maybe a bit skinnier. Imagine being given by your friends a house to stay in.

**Do you think at this point your memory will ever come back **

Yeah. I mean, statistically, it's supposed to.

**Do you want it to **

There's moments when I do, moments where I'm quite happy the way I am.

**When do you wish it would come back **

When I think about childhood, and its smells, its little details. It can be an old beatup picture of somebody, a toy, the smell of a cake. I don't have that. I miss not remembering the relationship with my mother and anyone who has passed away, anyone I haven't had a chance to meet. That's hard. But then all the bad things… It's strange. I feel between two worlds, between past and present, stuck between the two. I don't think I'm a nostalgic person. I don't really have any time for that. But there's something built into all human beings: You want to have some sense of belonging, or familiarity, probably familiarity—which I don't have.

**Your friends call you the oldest living virgin in New York. **

Oh, right, yeah. Well, not anymore.

Well…

Falling in love for the first time, I don't know if you can remember it, but your heart is out here, you're walking into walls, you can't think straight. It's allconsuming. It beats you around the head. It's a very strange thing to deal with. It was absolutely fantastic.

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